Heirs of Mana Omnibus

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Heirs of Mana Omnibus Page 81

by Matt Larkin


  Her meaning settled upon Poli‘ahu like a stone around her neck, cutting off her air even as it forced its way through confusion she might otherwise have wished remain intact. “Y-you … were one of the Sorceress Queens of Old Mu.”

  Pahulu chuckled, a sound of such malice it made Poli‘ahu’s skin crawl. “Seven sisters, seven queens … reborn heirs of ancient glory …”

  “What do you want from me!” Poli‘ahu demanded. “Why bring me here at all?”

  Pahulu grabbed her with such swiftness Poli‘ahu barely registered the move. The queen’s hand launched itself and seized the back of Poli‘ahu’s neck, hefting her off the ground as though she were but a doll. “I want you to look into the Dark. Look deep.”

  And the queen flung her into the chasm.

  13

  Days Gone

  The wind that whipped down from the mountain peak tugged at Poli‘ahu’s kihei. Lilinoe had procured a long white one matching her own for Poli‘ahu, handing it to her as though inducting her into a secret order. An order of Snow Queens, she supposed. Now, the bitter night winds threaten to strip the cloak from her shoulders.

  Ahead, Lilinoe kept climbing, seeming unperturbed even as the wind flapped her own kihei around. They had passed through the snow line already, and densely packed powder crunched under Poli‘ahu’s heels with each step forward.

  Her heart was hammering, a cold sweat dribbling down her back, and her legs ached to the point she expected them to stick in the snow and snap off every time she tried to lift them. Panting, she pressed her palms against her knees, desperate to catch her breath. The cold didn’t seem to harm her, though it burned her throat and seared her lungs.

  Lilinoe didn’t pause for her, still pushing on, up into a cloud or fog bank rolling down from the peak. Poli‘ahu rose, rubbed her arms, and shook her head. Was this madness? Did they walk into the very realm of Milu herself?

  For years, she’d trusted the akua, but what possibly might she expect to find up here on this snowy peak, away from all civilization?

  Finding herself with few options, she pushed on, tromping after Lilinoe, who had all but vanished in the fog and darkness. Yes, this seemed like something she’d have imagined in Lua-o-Milu.

  They took shelter beneath an overhang that served to hold back the wind’s bite.

  Mostly.

  Years of experience ought to have taught her Lilinoe would build no fire, wouldn’t even allow one, yet somehow Poli‘ahu still expected to enjoy a tiny blaze to warm herself. But no, of course not. No, the snow akua despised flame even more than sunlight.

  Instead, Poli‘ahu collapsed in front of the goddess, gasping as she lay on her back, staring up at icicles dangling down overhead like the fangs of some monstrous mo‘o. Some of them were as long as she was tall. Idly, she caught herself wondering what would happen if the wind actually managed to break one loose. Would it impale her? End everything? Shouldn’t she be more concerned about the possibility?

  “Tomorrow we shall reach a more permanent refuge up here. A place long prepared for your coming, once occupied by your predecessors. For now, embrace the Sight and meet my sisters.”

  “You want me to meditate? After pushing myself to the utter limits of my endurance. You want me to calm my mind and look into the dark and further strain myself?”

  “Yes …”

  Uh, huh. What exactly would the snow akua do if Poli‘ahu told her to go fuck herself?

  Instead, groaning, she forced herself to sit once again. To slip into meditative trance. Lilinoe had told her, once, that in time embracing the Sight and looking across the Veil would become second nature. Something Poli‘ahu could do at will, without thought or concentration.

  She found that unlikely.

  It felt more like trying to make her mind do a back handspring. While it was tied to a tree. She had to at once accept reality and deny it. To admit in the depths of her being that everything she thought she knew about existence was a pleasant lie, and something else lay just beneath the surface. To embrace the Sight was to revel in abstract horror. To wallow in nihilistic madness as one acknowledged one’s own insignificance on the cosmic scale.

  Trembling now—not from the cold, surely?—she felt herself falling. A sudden shift as reality threatened to bleed away from her. In the darkness of this cave, little changed visibly. A slight warping of the environment. The icicles no longer completely straight, but twisted, like crooked teeth. Shadows deepening, gray seeping into everything.

  An omnipresent moan replaced the howling wind. And there, just beyond the edge of the overhang, two more white-garbed snow akua waited, their kiheis billowing as though the breeze still reached them, even here. Their skirts ended in mist that billowed around them. Their skin was too pale, their hair white as well.

  “I give you Kahoupokane and Waiau, my sisters. Once, they were glorious Snow Queens as you might become. But they have now become true goddesses, moving beyond your world.”

  Her breath catching in her chest, Poli‘ahu rose and bowed to the other akua. “I … uh … I’m honored.”

  The one called Waiau drifted closer to Poli‘ahu, flitting around her like a shark circling its prey, looking her up and down. “Is she ready?”

  “Yes …” Lilinoe said. “We go to the sanctuary tomorrow night, and from there, we begin the earnest study of the Art. She has the potential to become truly great.”

  The words should have brought her pride, but Poli‘ahu felt only a rise of pressure in her head. A nameless fear of what else the goddesses would show her. A fear accompanied by the absolute knowledge she could never look away. Now, knowing even a hint of the truth of reality, Poli‘ahu could never go back to ignorance. It would call her deeper and deeper.

  As a child, she had heard once that all sorcerers went mad in time. They lost themselves in the fathomless depths of Pō until its shadows were all they ever saw.

  But then again, maybe practitioners of the Art knew truths no one else could ever understand. Maybe, they alone were not mad in the world.

  “I want to know,” she said.

  “Know what?” Waiau asked.

  “Everything.”

  The sanctuary the snow akua spoke of turned out to be an ice cave, carved down into the mountain in a way that should not have been possible. Only a few hundred feet from the sun, the cave bored down through snow and rock, becoming a tunnel that led into some subterranean hole Poli‘ahu had no doubt fed into Lua-o-Milu itself.

  At the threshold, an hour past sunset, she faltered, gaping at the hollow within. It was so dark, she couldn’t make out much of anything beyond, and she glanced at Lilinoe.

  The snow akua held up a hand, and blue-green flame rose from it. No … not flame so much as a wavering, iridescent light distorting the air. It had no heat, though, but it did serve to partially illuminate the tunnel, reflecting off the ice walls in a shower of pale light.

  Lilinoe led the way inside, passing through a ring of archways made of ice, but very clearly carved into such a shape. The tunnel was a bit steep, and away from the exit, without snow packing it down, slick, forcing Poli‘ahu to tread with care.

  It felt like something was in here, watching her, breathing down the back of her neck. It had the hairs on her arms rising, had her turning about peering into the darkness and the reflected light, pulse rising.

  “You feel them …”

  A sound came to her, like the stirring of leaves on a breeze, ephemeral and faint enough she might have imagined it. But she didn’t think so.

  Skin crawling, she followed Lilinoe into a central chamber as wide and tall as any king’s palace. Columns of ice supported an arching roof, all covered with strange designs that vaguely reminded her of tattoos, though more intricate.

  Other tunnels branched off of this main hall, one of which Lilinoe took her to, showing her a smaller room with shelves of ice on the walls, and an ice platform against one wall. “Your sleeping chamber,” the snow akua said.

  Across fro
m her private room, Lilinoe showed her a dining hall with a low ice table and elaborate floral designs carved into the walls. All featuring such delicate work of ice sculpting, she would have thought it impossible. “The Snow Queens of prior generations each added their own touches to the decor. Beyond here, you’ll note another tunnel ending in an empty room, a place Waiau dug out but never actually finished.”

  “What did she intend to build there?”

  “Ask her …”

  Her stomach lurched at the thought. But this was why she was here, wasn’t it? Poli‘ahu returned to the main hall and sat, closing her eyes and slipping into meditation.

  It was easier this time, falling into the void, pushing her mind across the Veil. As soon as she opened her eyes, she saw it—the shadows warping reality, the twisting of the light into a pale imitation. And Waiau and Kahoupokane as well.

  “She’s getting stronger,” Kahoupokane said.

  “Slowly. It will take years of study, training, practice …” Waiau said. “She may lose herself …”

  Poli‘ahu grimaced. “What did you intend to create in that side hall, Waiau?”

  Waiau wheezed, then fled the chamber as if Poli‘ahu had somehow offended her. She glanced over her shoulder to see Lilinoe.

  It was Kahoupokane who answered though. “The transformation from mortal to akua holds a peril within it. Not all parts of Waiau survived. Not all memories came through intact.”

  Poli‘ahu kept her gaze locked on Lilinoe. Was this another lesson? A warning about how dangerous pushing into the unknown was, even from akua?

  Yes. She rather thought it was a lesson. “Point taken.”

  It didn’t matter. Poli‘ahu had nowhere else to go. The snow sisters had chosen her, and she had accepted this route. She wanted the answers, all of them, and she wanted to be a Snow Queen. Any price was worth that knowledge and power.

  For months, the sisters instructed her in the use of her natural gifts as a kupua, powers drawn from Lua-o-Milu, they said, as well as in the greater use of the Art. They taught her ancient hulas from Old Mu designed to channel mana and focus her mind like a knife. They showed her their strange symbols—glyphs, they called them—that interacted with Pō and its denizens.

  Some glyphs represented particular entities, and thus Poli‘ahu inferred every etheric being must have its own unique sign, a kind of name to which it would answer. To draw the symbol at all would risk drawing the entity’s attention.

  It was eight months before they allowed her to attempt even the simplest of sorceries, a conjuring of a nearby ‘aumakua to question it.

  The ghost had once been a chief’s wife in Hilo but had died of something rupturing in her gut. An ugly, painful death. But still she held on, unwilling to let her husband or children face the world alone. Held on, until even her last son had died of old age. And then found she could not easily move past this place, instead finding herself inclined to watch over her grandchildren. Now, the eldest of them expected a child soon, as well.

  Looking into Pō, hearing the ghost’s tale, Poli‘ahu could almost forget she wasn’t talking to a living person. Almost, though the ghost remained slightly translucent, fading into the background of the ice cave. Though her voice had a hollowness to it.

  Still, conversing with that ‘aumakua drained her, as if a constant pressure in her mind kept trying to break loose and tear her apart. An entire circle of wards—strange symbols carved into the floor—held the ghost at bay, if just barely.

  Lilinoe instructed her once she had banished the entity. “A strong enough etheric being might project an image of itself into the Mortal Realm under the right circumstances, not so unlike how mortal sorcerers might learn to Spirit Walk into Pō. Most have nowhere near that sort of power. We selected a young, weak ghost for you to call this time. Still, feel how it has sapped away at your Will and mana, feel how it nearly overpowered you. Had you faltered, the ‘aumakua might have claimed your body and used it to walk among the living once again. Could you feel it? Her desire for your flesh? The chance for her to see those she watched over with living eyes, to touch others, to feel the warmth?”

  They had told her over and over. A single misdrawn glyph, a slip in concentration, or a faltering of her confidence, and something from Pō or beyond might slip inside her and make her a prisoner in her own mind. Even the ‘aumākua, who believed themselves protectors of their descendants, were no friends to sorcerers.

  The months rolled by, the lessons continued, and Poli‘ahu felt, at times, as if her mind expanded so quickly it would break free and flow away in the mountain winds. Maybe, she mused, a part of her already had.

  Two years after coming to this sanctuary, Poli‘ahu sat just outside in the late afternoon. The snow sisters would not train her until nightfall, but she often could not sleep through the entire day. These times, she would wander the summit, looking down at the world far below.

  A blanket of mist had settled across the island, stretching almost to the mountain peaks. Almost, but not quite. From where she sat, nestled in the snows atop Mauna Kea, Poli‘ahu could look down at that blanket and imagine walking across the sky, gazing upon the inhabitants of her island like she were a true goddess of the snows.

  She felt it, the mountain.

  Over time, luxuriating in the mana up here, she had grown closer and closer to Mauna Kea itself. Now, she felt its snows as she slept. Felt the snows when they fell from the sky. Felt it, even, when something disturbed her slopes.

  As now.

  People climbed her mountain. She could feel their presence distorting her mists, crunching her snows beneath their feet, their hot breath carried upon the wind until she could smell it. Two people. Their steps faltering, uncertain because of the almost sheer drops beneath them. On the lower slopes, lush greenery covered the mountainside, a rainforest often engulfed by mist. Up here, above that cloud, snows that never melted capped the peaks.

  Though she could feel human presences disrupting the mountain, it wasn’t the same as being able to see those making the climb. There was no real way for her to tell one person from another. The size of the footprints indicated this pair was likely a man and a woman. A month ago—or was it two?—a mother had climbed the mountain, begging Poli‘ahu to save her child from some illness.

  Already, word had begun to spread that a new Snow Queen had taken residence on Mauna Kea, the first in generations.

  But Poli‘ahu had no immediate way to help the woman, though she hated sending her away with nothing. Anyone who made such extreme effort to see her deserved a reward for it.

  Often enough in the past month, Poli‘ahu had turned her studies to searching for a cure. Broad as her disciplines had grown, however, healing was not her strongest area, nor did even the snow akua seem to hold such power.

  She might summon an ‘aumakua to help the woman, but Lilinoe had warned her she’d pay a price for doing so. One could not exact a service from a spirit or ghost without paying a price.

  Now, she frowned. What did these new people want? Like the mother seeking a cure for her child, did more supplicants seek blessings she could not grant, much as she might want to?

  When evening came, she called for Waiau. “Who climbs the mountain?”

  The akua glared as if put off by Poli‘ahu’s question. Still, she flitted off into the mist, returning after a long moment. “Your parents.”

  What?

  Now it was Poli‘ahu’s turn to scowl. Those people might have given birth to her—maybe—but they were not her parents.

  They had abandoned her.

  Perhaps they told themselves they sent Poli‘ahu for training. Which was just a way of saying they didn’t know what to do with a girl with such powers in their midst. They must have learned she would be kupua and couldn’t handle it. Her parents had had no time for her then and she had nothing to say to them now. Poli‘ahu had found her true home on this mountain, her true family among the sisters.

  She climbed to her feet and cupped
her hands to her face. Then she blew out a stream of icy wind that swept around the mountain in a spiral, growing ever faster. It blew away the mist, yes, but it also crystallized the air, forming an icy gale that blasted along the slopes. The old man and woman would turn back, of course, afraid of her once more. Poli‘ahu didn’t even bother staying to sense their failure.

  When she was twenty-three, the sisters sent her down to Hilo. She strode through the town, regal white mantle streaming behind her so everyone could see and know for certain.

  A new Snow Queen reigned.

  She made her way directly for the king’s palace and no guards dared to bar her passage. She stormed into the hall, and a dozen people rose to meet her. The king, his wife, his children, his advisors. The main court of Hilo, all gathered here together, gaping at her, the strange icy woman who trailed mist at her heels as if an akua herself.

  In a way, she was. A living goddess. A god-queen, albeit one without a throne.

  Which had to change.

  “I am Poli‘ahu, Snow Queen of Mauna Kea, and descendant of Manua the Ancient. I have come to claim my due. Pledge your fealty to me and rule in my name, King.” She left the alternative unspoken.

  For a long time, the king stared her, and no one dared break the silence.

  Lilinoe had warned her she might have to make an example of a few people. Prove her claim to godhood. She didn’t relish the idea, but she’d do what she must. The path was laid out before her, and no one could be allowed to interfere with her destiny.

  “What will you do for us as queen?” the king finally said.

  She pushed down her first instinct—to threaten. She had not come to ask for support, but to demand it. Yet, if there was a way to be accepted and even loved by the people, was that not better? “You are troubled by the newcomers from Kahiki and plagued by illnesses and other woes. I hold congress with the gods of the mountain and can sway them in your favor. I can protect you and bring prosperity to Hilo like which has not been seen in nearly a century. That is my offer to you—to bring the akua and ‘aumākua onto your side.”

 

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